111LIVING
It captured the artist Sue Webster’s attention as she cycled
past the corrugated-iron fence on her way to visit her friend,
the chef Mark Hix, who at the time lived nearby. “I always
liked standalone buildings, and I was intrigued by this one- it was already monumental,” the 53-year-old recalls, of
the roofless, scaffolding-strung façade of dirty brown brick
and peeling cream paint. She rang Hackney Council. “They
said, ‘Google the Mole Man,’ and hung up,” she cackles.
“Most people would have run a mile. But I thought, ‘I am
going to buy this building.’”
It took more than a year of pestering, and a tense bidding
war at auction, before Webster finally took possession of the
house in 2012. Her dealer, Harry Blain, put in the winning
bid. “He knows how to spend that kind of money – he buys
Warhols,” she smiles. Situated inside the hairpin where two
roads meet, the house, which resembles the prow of a boat,
was stuffed as full as a cruise ship: when Webster eventually
emptied it (in approximately 300 skip loads), three cars and
a boat materialised. She pondered whether to restore the
property, eventually showing some photographs to the
architect David Adjaye. The two had worked together on
her previous home, known as Dirty House, in Shoreditch,
where she had lived with Tim Noble, her collaborator and
now ex-husband. “David’s got this crazy enthusiasm. He
said, ‘This looks like a mind-f**k!’” she recalls. “I think
I needed somebody who was going to push me further.”
The similarities between the Mole Man and Webster are
curious. Lyttle hated waste – so much so that he cut light
switches in half, so that he could use them twice. One local
resident recalls a time when the roof of the house sprung
a leak, and Lyttle somehow procured an old Wonderbra
billboard, 20ft wide, which he affixed to cover the hole.
Webster has likewise made a living out of the discarded:
her and Noble’s breakthrough moment, in the late-’90s,
post-YBA art scene, came courtesy of the duo’s “shadow
sculptures”, which comprised intricately assembled piles of
household junk that revealed portraits in the light. “People
have been emailing me saying, this couldn’t have gone to a
better home,” Sue laughs. “It’s about taking something that
society had thrown away, that nobody else wanted, and then
making something from it.”
Webster was determined to preserve what she could of
the original building. “I’ve kept the exterior much as it was - because I just love it looking like a f**ked-up bunker,” she
says. Adjaye’s idea was to sink the house below street level,
underpinning the foundations, adding concrete bay windows
to replace rotten wooden frames and concrete belly bands
to support their weight, as well as a flat roof, “like a little
hat on top”. Two-thousand tons of the council’s cheap, aerated
concrete were dug out of some of the tunnels, and palms
and shrubs were planted in the crevices. Another odd
platform with salvaged “Mole Man steps” that lead to
nowhere has become a terrace.
Inside, light streams through the centre of the house via
the “James Bond skylight”, as Webster has dubbed the glass
sliding roof. Adjaye cast concrete walls to mimic wood grain,
while others are lined with Douglas fir. In the ground-floor,
open-plan living space, industrial wall lamps from Trainspotters - a salvage firm near Sue’s country house in Gloucestershire,
to which she escapes most weekends – hang from the ceilings.
Cacti in huge Serralunga tubs sit in the bay windows beside
artworks by her friends Tracey Emin and Danny Fox. Webster
sits painting at the multicoloured marble table from New
Tendency most mornings. Upstairs, a desk on the landing
proves the perfect spot for drawing, while a spare room houses
a Supreme boxing punch-bag, an old birthday present from
Above: the house
occupies the hairpin
where two roads meet.
The walls surrounding
the property comprise
15,000 reclaimed
London stock bricksTim. “I love not having to clean up after myself,” she says.
“Every inch of the house is somehow being used.”
The renovations, finally completed in the summer of 2018,
have proved cathartic for Webster, dovetailing as they did
with the breakdown of her marriage. She leads me down a
cantilevered staircase into the light-filled, double-height
basement where her studio lies. The main wall is dominated
by one of her first solo pieces since her split with Noble: a
True Detective-style crime scene wall of paraphernalia salvaged
from her teenage bedroom. Ticket stubs, medication trays,
album sleeves and love letters trace her life back to the woman
she considers her “surrogate mother”: Siouxsie Sioux. “I went
into self-investigation mode,” she says. “I was on a rock’n’roller
coaster for 20 years – where two people became one. When
that exploded and dissolved, I just decided to go full circle
to where I was before I met Tim. And I made a theory that
everything I’ve ever learnt in life is from listening to the first
four albums of Siouxsie and the Banshees.” She has written
a memoir, too, in which she reveals for the first time how she
was institutionalised at the age of 13. “I needed to let go of
all this stuff,” Sue shrugs. “Moving here is like a rebirth. This
is now me on my own. I am moving forward with my life
and my career. It feels like a clean break.” n
I Was a Teenage Banshee, by Sue Webster, is out now (Rizzoli, £40)11-19-FOB-Interior-MoleHouse.indd 111 16/09/2019 15:07